Yesterday I had coffee with a few old friends who do VC. Everyone was sighing, saying that now all the hot money online and programmers are pouring into the AI space, and the crypto space is cold like an ice cave.

But Pantera’s partner recently posted an article, and the take is pretty interesting. He said: “A bear market isn’t a dead time—it’s the touchstone for shedding tourists and filtering out the ruthless.”
If you think the blockchain is about to be over, take a look at these data points and stories:
1️⃣ Who’s退出了? Who is still here? AI has taken away $211B in venture capital, while Crypto only has $20 billion. Code submission volume has plunged 75%. Seems like it’s going to cool off? But the data shows: the ones who ran off are “tourists” who entered during the last bull market; while hardcore developers who stayed in the circle for more than 2 years actually hit a record high, writing 70% of the code. There was a clearance in 2022—now it’s happening again. A bear market never chases away the people who truly do the work; it only clears out speculators.
2️⃣ The truly top-tier operators are charging into Web3 from “traditional finance” on foot. Don’t think everyone is running away. The very top group of founders are using their resumes to rush into Web3 from Citadel, Goldman Sachs, Stripe, and Block. Like Ondo founder Nathan Allman, who came out of Goldman Sachs and pushed RWA to $2.6 billion; Arbitrum founder Ed Felten, who came from the White House and Princeton to work on scaling. They’re not here to hype narratives—they’re here to chew through hard bones: “institutional-grade financial infrastructure.”
3️⃣ In a bull market, people bet on products. In a bear market, people bet on Founder-Market Fit. Prices will fall, products will pivot, and regulation will change. But “why are you more suited than everyone else in the world to win this market?” is the only thing that compounds when prices don’t rise. In the bear market, Pantera invested in Arbitrum and Ondo, relying on four things it saw clearly: deep professional expertise, extremely strong proactiveness, unfair network resources, and an almost crazy Obsession (obsession).
The real question has never been “will the market come back or not,” but “when the market comes back, will you and your project still stand?”
If you’re still grinding away in this space, don’t panic—stay focused, and we’ll see you at the peak of the bull market.
#Web3 # Blockchain #加密货币 # Pantera